


The Roadtrip

by vinnie2757



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Explicit Language, F/M, Slow Burn, Van Life, au where laura lives the #vanlife and keeps bumping into clint, but alas i am bound to school for another two years, i too want to disappear in a van, its gonna be a great one, listen i am projecting all of my fears and desires onto laura and living vicariously through her, roadtrip au, who is as weirded out as she is but you bet theres gonna be some
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-17
Updated: 2018-09-17
Packaged: 2019-07-13 15:03:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16020365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vinnie2757/pseuds/vinnie2757
Summary: Laura, tired of a normal life, buys a van, kits it out, and gets out of dodge as fast as the thing can carry her. She intends to keep herself to herself and do some major soul-searching, so why does she keep running into the same man, pretending to be other men? Coincidence, or fate?[Claura roadtrip au]





	The Roadtrip

**Author's Note:**

> I live, I laugh, I love, I have crippling anxiety about the modern world. Enjoy my lovelies!

It wasn't that Laura had wanted to go, so much as her happiness meant more to her than duty.

She'd worked for a year as a bartender, and months upon months of wasted, hateful time spent working as a cashier. Her earnings had gone into a budget; first for a van, and then kitting it out, and then promptly fucking off in it. It was only a little Chevrolet, with a bed and a kitchenette and it's not _really_ something she could live in for an extended period, but fuck you she was going to. As soon as she had enough money for gas and for food, she packed up her bags, and off she went, with a map and a thermos of tea and a spare pair of driving shoes.

Driving the Chevy was not - ideal. It was heavy and handled badly and she hadn't quite secured the one drawer under the bed, so it rattled annoyingly, but she turned up the stereo, sang along to Coolio and All Saints and Whitney, and ignored it.

She reckoned, map spread across the table in the diner she stopped at for dinner on the first night, fries and coke in her mouth as she used a red pen to draw a route, that it would take her almost three months, if she took her time to really enjoy herself. She could spend a lot longer out there in the wild, and maybe she would; if she found a good town, she could rock up for a week, take some cash-in-hand weekly paid jobs, keep her funds going, and make the whole thing last longer.

'You want to give New York at least two weeks,’ says a voice above her, as a shadow falls across the map.

A half-chewed mouthful of burger in her mouth, Laura looks up and promptly chokes on it. A handsome - like - for real handsome -man is stood looking at the map, a crease between his brows, and his teeth worrying at his lip.

'Yeah?’ she says, when she's cleared her throat. 'Is there that much to do?’

'Nah, you'll just have to wait that long for the subway to get you anywhere,’ he says with a snort. 'Especially from Brooklyn to Manhattan. I've walked it faster.’

She finds herself smiling, but she's not stupid; she doesn't offer him a seat. She's not even out of Idaho yet, she's not going to get stabbed before she's slept in her van once. She bought new sheets for it and everything. They have the power rangers on, because she's a grown woman who wants to not be a grown woman living in a society that doesn't have room for her, and she does what she wants.

'Is there anywhere you'd recommend?’ she asks, 'i think I've covered the basics.’

He turns to look at the map the right side up.

'Don’t go to Des Moines, it's a trap,’ he says, and jabs his finger on Iowa’s little square. 'If you have an interest in history, go to the Amana Colonies, or there's the Czech museum in Cedar Rapids, I guess.’

'You know a lot about Iowa?’ she asks, because it's rude to ask where you're from.

'Born there,’ he says, 'wasn’t a home, though.’

He hesitates for a second, and then drops his finger just above where her line has crossed through the state. 'Born here-ish, little town called Waverly. It was a shithole then, and it's a shithole now.’

'I’m sure it's not,’ she says, but if anyone had asked her about Idaho City, she'd have said the same fucking thing.

He gives her a look, and wishes her luck.

When he's gone, she looks back at the map, and writes “Waverly,” in the area he'd jabbed his finger.

* * *

She learns as she goes, about the van. She tightens up the drawer so it doesn't rattle, screws on a bolt lock on the inside so that nobody can get in while she's asleep, adapts the kitchenette as she uses it, buys some battery powered fairy lights to string up around the bed, and a plentiful amount of second hand books to get her through the evenings.

It's the evenings that get her most, she finds. Where before she'd be working, or with her dad, now she's on her own, with just books and the stars or rivers or whatever she pulls up alongside. And in the beginning, this is fine, it does her well. She likes the peace and the quiet and the nothingness of her surroundings. It's a lot more who she is than the bullshit of Saturday night chat shows and her dad's attempts to bond with her.

But then the silence starts to grate. She buys a little radio, plays it to fill the space.

She considers buying a dog.

* * *

It's in Portland, in a Starbucks on the corner of Southwest and 4th Avenue that she sees him again. At first, she doesn't recognize him; he's unshaven, and dressed in workman's wear, with a tool belt and a scowl and bruised knuckles, but his eyes are sparkling behind the grumpiness. He orders five espressos, and his quip about five kids is too obviously a lie. She stares at the back of his head, and Aaron is not his name, but it's the name he answers to.

He doesn't look at her, moving up the queue as he downs half his cup in one. She watches him in the reflection of the counter as he turns his head, surveys his surroundings, and then disappears through the door. She's called to the counter, and she doesn't think any more of it.

* * *

Someone gets mugged less than 50 feet from her camper. She's engrossed in a copy of Wuthering Heights at the time, and the scream startles her. She grabs her kettle, the heaviest thing nearest to hand, and leaps out of the van, ready to start something, anything. Working in a trucker bar, having been not old enough to drink, has given her a spine of steel, and the strongest grip on a thumb that the local bikers have ever known.

'Fucker!’ she yells, and she's barefoot on the outskirts of Portland, with a head full of Classical Literature and no patience, and she never learned how to address people.

The mugger pauses, a freeze frame from some horrid educational VCR about crime, and she almost laughs, but then she's throwing herself into him, kettle at the ready.1

One good clout to the face scares him off, and the girl holds her handbag close, staring at Laura with wonder. She's taller and in heels to boot, blinking and unsure.

'You alright?’ Laura asks, aware of what she looks like.

'Yeah,’ she says, eventually. 'Yeah, I'm. You're crazy, you know that?’

Laura shrugs. She's been called worse. 'Couldn't just sit there and listen to it, you know?’

The girl does know, but doesn't know if she'd have been brave enough to go barefoot and armed with a kettle. Laura flushes, and her feet begin to throb.

'Don’t suppose you know what's good in Oregon?’ she asks. 'I’ve done Portland now, I'm thinking about moving on in the morning.’

The girl tells her about the sloth sanctuary and the haunted toilets, as well as a botanical garden that's a Catholic shrine. Laura rubs the tattoo behind her ear, and says that she'll consider that one in the light of day.

The sloth sanctuary sounds pretty fucking cool tho, so after some final stilted thank yous and goodbyes, Laura returns to the camper and her book and turns the radio up.

* * *

She never does visit the Catholic garden. She parks outside and drums her fingers against the wheel, but can't bring herself to get out of the camper. Instead she does a three point turn and fucks off over the state line, into Washington, following the I-5 to Seattle.

 

* * *

There's a nice little Italian seafood place in the middle of town, and it's so reasonably priced she doesn't mind the wait for a seat. She gets chatting with the hostess, who fills her in on all sorts of gossip about the town; where best to eat, the car parks where no one bothers you, the best thrift store for books and decent jeans. She's just telling the girl about the sloth sanctuary when she stops, and looks, and looks some more.

'Again?’ she asks herself, because this is weird now.

Twice, she's seen him since that first night in Idaho, and she's wondering now if there's not some ulterior motive.

'Again?’ the girl asks.

The man is speaking fluent Italian to his server, who flushes under the attention and giggles, brushes her hair behind her ear. Laura watches, amazed. He's shaven this time, in a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled and there's a smartness to the way he sits, very different to the workman she'd seen in Starbucks. In fact, the difference is so strong that she's not even sure, despite looking right at him, that it's the same man. But it has to be, because his eyes are so very, very blue.

'Nothing, nothing, I'm going mad,’ she says.

'Aren’t we all?’ the hostess snorts, and says goodbye to a couple leaving, opening up a table for Laura.

 

* * *

The food is so nice Laura's belly aches from the fullness as she heads back to her camper. There's a light drizzle, and she digs in her bag for a pen and notebook, writing

 

  * Get a waterproof coat you silly girl



 

in the biggest writing she can manage while walking.

Her hair's frizzy by the time she's back in the camper, but she's learned to get a day pass to a swimming pool whenever she's in a city in order to get a) some decent exercise and b) a decent shower, because the gyms always have good water pressure, and one of the girls is always helpful with braiding Laura's hair. She hasn't worn it straight in weeks, but it doesn't make no nevermind to her.

Back in the camper, in dry clothes and bed socks and her multitude of blankets, she picks up her book again and settles down for a good solid read.

The pitter patter of rain sends her to sleep with the radio playing low in the background, some news story about a drugs ring blown apart from the inside out.

* * *

She goes back to that Italian place the next night, but the man isn't there. The hostess is, and they trade hair tips and discuss all the vital nothings of young women. Laura pretends like she isn't looking for the man every time she takes her eyes off the book in her hand, but she is.

He's not there, and he doesn't appear, and she wonders if maybe she'd imagined him.

* * *

The rest of Washington passes without incident, as does Montana. She spends a few days in Yellowstone. She's been there before, but not really stopped to take it all in. It's incredible, truly, and she breathes it in, all the air and sound and smell. It feels like home, almost, in a way she can't quite put words to, but she thinks of it all the same.

She meets some campers, who give her hints and tips about space saving solutions, and she buys some jars and a drill next time she's in a K-Mart.

The radio talks about the mental health benefits of dogs, and she stares at the same page of her book for several long, long minutes.

* * *

After cutting down through Wind River and rejoining the interstate, she stops at a few of the towns on the road before ending up in Cheyenne. It's all a little too like home for her liking; an overturned snowmobile makes her think of her brother, and the blood of his broken arm. She does a day wandering around the city, turns in her finished books, does some laundry and buys herself some new socks and underwear.

There's a very friendly Labrador outside the discount box store where she picks up a 5-pack of trainer socks, and she stops to rub its belly. It doesn't look like a stray, but there's no owner in sight. So she tells it she's going to buy it some dog treats, but when she gets back from having done so, the dog is gone.

'Oh well,’ she says to herself, 'I guess I've got bribes for the next dog I see.’

* * *

She doesn't see a dog for another week or so, not one she can pet, at least. She just sees a lot of empty nothingness as she does an oversized U-turn to get up to the Nebraska national forest. There's not a whole lot to do around these parts, but she doesn't mind so much; the native businesses keep her in a steady supply of blankets and baskets to keep fruit in. One pretty young woman just north of the forest is just finishing up a jacket when Laura wanders past, and she stops, fascinated, to watch her weaving the ends in.

'That’s amazing,’ she says, 'how long did it take?’

The woman is eager to tell Laura all about the effort she put into it, and a few hours later, having bared their souls in that way young women meeting a Nice Girl tend to do, Laura walks away minus a fair amount of her wallet but plus a really fucking nice jacket. It goes perfectly badly with her shorts and vintage boho tunic, and she doesn't give a shit about the clash of colours because it's a fantastic jacket. There had been a bit of a - vibe - about the woman, she thinks later, trudging her way through Dickens for lack of anything more appealing in the thrift shop two towns ago. Like there was something more to her sitting there in that town with her weaving and her curious doe eyes. She thinks about it too much, she's sure, and wonders if she's not found some secret government agent.

'You’re going mad from the loneliness,’ she tells herself with a snort, and puts the book down.

 

* * *

The woman is not there the next day.

* * *

Laura finally cracks just over the border of Minnesota. There's a bunch of hiking trails some people in North Dakota recommended to her, and she thinks she might like to take some of them, with a thermos of tea and a good book for when her feet start to ache, but before that.

Before all that.

She has a really good cry.

Well, no. It’s not a really good cry, not really. It’s an awful cry, all snot and choked breaths and there’s no one she can hug it out with, like she would have done at home. There isn’t even a payphone for her to call her dad or her brother with. Todd would have taken the next job to Minnesota that he could get his hands on, and he’d have made her wait for him, and then he’d have taken her to the movies and bought her the biggest ribeye and the best fries in the state, and he’d not have left her side until he was sure she was okay. Hell, he’d have ditched the truck to drive her home himself, and the thought of him, the thought of how _badly_ she missed him now, it makes it all worse.

She cries and she cries and she cries and she bawls her fucking guts out until she doesn’t have anything left inside her to cry. And then she cries some more.

She doesn’t sleep that night, parks up in the middle of nowhere, and climbs onto the roof to sit there and stare at the stars and wonder what the fuck she was thinking, doing this.

‘I made a bad choice,’ she says to herself, and then she gets up the next morning and she tells herself that she did nothing of the sort, that her choice was the right one at the right time and she’d probably have been dead if she hadn’t.

The kind of life expected of her in Idaho, the quiet, small-town, day-to-day humdrum of having absolutely nothing better to do than gossip about the neighbours, fuck that. It wasn’t her, it wasn’t what she wanted from her life, and she wasn’t about to sacrifice what little personality the trucker bar had given her for that shit.

* * *

She goes on a few hikes. She sees a few dogs, and always has treats in her pockets for them. There are a few caves too, and she enjoys a couple of days spent spelunking. She hasn’t spelunked since she was six, and she loves it.

In Duluth, she finally buys herself a raincoat, and finds a pair of thick winter boots on sale, so she buys those, too. It’s not going to be winter before she’s done, but she thinks about making it last until then. She doesn’t have a heater of any sort in the camper, but hot water bottles exist for a reason.

* * *

In Minneapolis, she sees him again. He’s getting into a fight, because of course he is. He’s been a workman and a businessman, of course he’s now in Timberlands and a hoodie and punching the shit out of some man in the middle of the street like a fucking criminal. For a moment, she wonders about pausing, about waiting for them to beat the shit out of each other, and then wading in with words of wisdom and scolding, and then she decides better of it.

As she walks past, shouldering a couple of hollering hooligans out of the way, time stops dead, in that way time stops dead in all romantic comedies. She can feel everything in that moment; the brush of the wind against her cheek, sweeping a strand of hair into her mouth, the cracked pavement beneath her canvas pumps, the hooting and hollering of the mob becoming a quiet drone in the near distance, the heat of his gaze as his eyes lock with hers.

Both of their heads turn as she keeps walking, and then the universe propels them immediately back into the present with the crack of bone on bone as he gets punched in the face hard enough to crack his cheekbone.

She winces, and beats a hasty retreat, getting in the camper, despite her desire to stay another night and try out that other restaurant one of the servers in last night’s Indian restaurant had recommended. After that, she can’t afford to stay. Surely, he must have recognised her, and the thought that he was either following her, or managing to identify her - no.

No, thank you.

So she takes her leave, and gets across the border to Iowa before the night draws cold and empty around her.

* * *

Iowa is a peculiar place, which is to say; Waverly is a peculiar place. She’d found, as she drove and drove and drove, that she wanted to stop and look around less and less, and just wanted to get to Iowa and get the fuck out the other side. She doesn’t even know what she expects to find, but she pulls up on the side of the road all the same, puts her shoes back on, and out she gets.

It’s drizzling a little, so she puts on her raincoat, and she goes out into the wilderness of the absolutely nothing that Waverly proves to be.

There are picturesque houses, and there are wide open streets, but other than that, there’s not much of a town to be had.

It’s mostly fast food and cars, with a few individually-owned stores thrown in, and she wanders and she wanders, and in a quiet corner - ha, the entire town seems quiet - she finds a boarded up butcher’s. Here, she stops, and feels like she’s witnessing something important.

‘Tragic,’ says an old lady walking her Shih Tzu.

Laura, instinctively, reaches into her pocket for a treat, and crouches to offer it to the dog.

‘What is?’ she asks, and frowns at the boards, looking some decade old, rotten and yet - nobody’s touched them.

‘What happened to those poor boys.’

Laura does not reply, and the old lady jumps, as if remembering herself.

‘Goodness, you’re a traveller, I hadn’t - excuse me. It was a family-owned butcher, father, mother, two sons. Absolute terrors, they were, but aren’t all boys?’

Laura, having two older brothers, agrees with a snort.

‘They never stop,’ she says.

‘No, I suppose not.’

‘What happened?’

‘Well, I don’t like to speak ill of the dead,’ the lady begins, and then hesitates.

‘I’m happy to. Was the dad an alcoholic piece of shit?’

The old lady is not as scandalised as perhaps the elders of Idaho might have been. Laura finds it refreshing to not be clouted about the ear for swearing.

‘Amongst other things,’ the lady says, with a scowl that could have burned the devil alive. ‘He - well, the boys lost their mother that day, and no crime could be worse.’

Laura nods, and cannot imagine the grief she will feel when her mother dies. They aren’t on the best terms - Laura had said nothing to her of this trip, of leaving behind her life to disappear into the wilderness for a few months - but she would grieve all the same.

‘They were put into the system, what good it is. Last any of us heard, they’d run away. Eldest joined the army, so we heard. But poor Clinton, nobody’s heard hide nor hair of him since he ran away.’

‘Clinton,’ Laura says, because that is an unfortunate name.

The old lady shrugs. ‘You can find her grave in the cemetery, if you care to look. Edith Barton. Someone destroyed Harold’s grave a few years ago, and with the boys gone, nobody thought to replace it.’

Laura has a feeling, deep in her belly, as she looks at the cobwebbed and dusty windows of the butcher’s shop, that she has been let into the knowledge of something that perhaps she should not have been, and she wonders what she will have to do with this knowledge.

After the lady has walked on with her dog, the rain begins to pour harder, and Laura goes off in search of a florist. There is no sense in turning up to a grave without something to offer, and though she owes this Edith no loyalty, she also owes her no ill will.

The florist eyes her, but doesn’t ask questions, and Laura asks for directions to the cemetery, so that she might pay respects.

Directions obtained, and torrential rain atop her head, off she goes, pondering what she has learned.

* * *

Standing in front of a well-kept and well-loved, given the fresh flowers laid against the stone, grave of a woman she does not know, Laura begins to consider, and she continues to consider for some time, until the gravekeeper comes to ask if she might move on so he can lock the gates. Something about teenagers, he says, and Laura says that they’re a menace, good-naturedly, because she isn’t a horrible person, not yet, anyway.

Heading back to the camper and pulling into a quiet road where nobody can bother her, she finds herself staring blankly at the pages of Fitzgerald until finally, she finds words to put to the feeling.

‘It’s you,’ she says, ‘isn’t it?’

* * *

In Manhattan, in a debriefing room of the Hub, where his asshole is getting chewed out over the debacle of that fight in Minnesota, Clint Barton shudders as though someone walked over his mother’s grave.

**Author's Note:**

> \- I wrote this entirely in google docs, so I apologise for errors. If there's any glaring ones, please dear god tell me, I can't bear the shame :')  
> \- It's probably not going to be a very long fic, but updates probably won't be too regular since I'm now at college god bless  
> \- See you next time, lovelies!


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